In a previous series of blog posts, we discussed the Kubernetes objects typically used to run a web application. We covered, Namespace, Pod, ConfigMap, Secret, Service, Deployment, ServiceAccount, Ingress, PDB, HPA, PV, PVC, Job and CronJob. In this post, we will discuss some fundamental building blocks for the Kubernetes cluster administration: RBAC objects. In most situations, Kubernetes API server is started with the flag --authorization-mode=RBAC which enables RBAC in the cluster.

This is a guide to write a Kubernetes controller. We will kick off by inspecting the Kubernetes API from inside a pod within the cluster. Minikube suffices for this exercise. But you can conduct the exercise to any Kubernetes cluster. The controller watches events related to Kubernetes pods using the Kubernetes API. When there is a new event, the controller logs the event’s type and the name of the affected pod.

Architecture 1: Kubernetes Control Plane Without HA Create three Virtual Machine guests on your laptop or workstation. VM 01 - Kubernetes Control Plane VM 02, VM 03 - Kubernetes Worker nodes Architecture 2: Kubernetes Control Plane With HA Create five Virtual Machine guests on your laptop or workstation. VM 01, VM 02, VM 03 - Kubernetes Control Plane with HA VM 04, VM 05 - Kubernetes Worker nodes Use the Kubeadm tool to create the cluster.

In the Kubernetes Objects Required For A Typical Web Application post we talked about few Kubernetes objects that a web application developer should get accustomed to. In this post, we will extend the series and talk about more objects that can help web developers scale their applications. As we delve deeper into Kubernetes topics, the demarcation of roles and skill sets start to reveal. In larger organizations, a dedicated team of infrastructure engineers design and make choices of network topology, IAC tooling and orchestration of the Kubernetes clusters and CI/CD pipelines.

In a previous post, we discussed using age to manage secrets in Git repositories. In this post, let’s improve our secrets management workflow in Git repositories using SOPS. sops is an editor of encrypted files that supports popular configuration formats such as YAML and various encryption techniques such as age. Read the blog post about age to install the package and creating the key file. This time, we will use sops to perform encryption and decryption operations instead of the age command.

Are you storing secrets such as database credentials, API keys, etc. unencrypted in Git repositories? Stop. To protect your secrets, do not store them anywhere unencrypted. Especially in Git repositories. Ideally, your organization must have some vault solution where secrets can be stored and securely shared with people on a need-to-know basis. In many small organizations, having such a central secrets management solution is still a luxury. The need to store such secret information in Git repositories is obvious.

From an application developer and Kubernetes user’s point of view, you have to have a working knowledge of Kubernetes. The post outlines the most important Kubernetes objects required to deploy a typical web application. Let us assume that the web application uses the two-tier architecture. We also assume that the cluster is created and administered by an infrastructure or DevOps engineer and the necessary access is provided to the developer to deploy their web application onto the Kubernetes cluster.